It’s not easy selling Miami on avant-garde music. Sometimes you even have to give the stuff away. Gustavo Matamoros knows this. The artistic director of the South Florida Composers Alliance’s annual Subtropics 9 New Music Festival — and a respected avant-garde composer in his own right — has over the…
Buick MacKane The Pawn Shop Years (Rykodisc) The best way to distinguish the solo work of Austin singer/songwriter Alejandro Escovedo from his side-band excursions with Buick MacKane is to cue up the first cut on The Pawn Shop Years, the MacKane unit’s debut album. Anyone who’s been swimming through Escovedo’s…
Beginning Sunday, May 18, South Beach music venue Stella Blue (1661 Meridian Ave., Miami Beach, 532-4788) adds a Latin rock night to its already varied agenda. The cozy club gets down and dirty as party bands Khadir and El Duende bring on the rhythm. Next Sunday (May 25) Peruvian rock…
The most interesting thing about ZZ Top is that on the surface there doesn’t seem to be anything at all interesting about them. They’ve sold millions of records, lasted into their third decade, and continue to draw loyal herds no matter how their new album performs in the marketplace. Don’t…
Zen (1203 Washington Ave., Miami Beach, 673-2817) expands its party parade with two new/newish one-nighters. Tomorrow night (Friday) party promoters Jeff Hubert and Carlos Gonzalez catch the crowds with Pump, a deep-house dance party where DJ Eddie X is king of his own turntable throne. A large dance floor will…
NuYorican Soul NuYorican Soul (Giant Step/Blue Thumb) Never underestimate Puerto Rico. True, the island’s treasured salsa has been eclipsed by Dominican merengue and other rhythms. But the sonic highway that brought so much great music from Puerto Rico to New York in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies has been well…
The music of southern Louisiana has been described in many ways, but “progressive” isn’t a word you often see thrown in the direction of the myriad zydeco and Cajun bands that set the region’s culture and mores to music that ranges from reeling to rocking, from swaying to smoldering. Of…
Robert Price is not a happy man. At least not now. It’s the day before his band Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa is set to embark on a monthlong club tour that will take them through the South, across Texas, and up and down the West Coast from Los Angeles to Seattle…
If you will, indulge me in these two recollections: (1) Sometime in the hot summer of 1993, three friends and I were sucking down beers at the local punk club in Memphis, Tennessee, a scummy little stinkpit called the Antenna. Between band sets an acquaintance of ours — a hustler…
As grunge teeters on the brink of extinction, with Soundgarden hanging up its flannel, Nirvana but a lingering memory, and Pearl Jam a hermitish ensemble that will most likely call it quits, Australia’s teenage power trio Silverchair is hoping to fight the odds and carry its head-pounding rock into the…
Those of you who love to complain about Miami the cultural wasteland now have no excuse for missing the scene at Backstage (12202 NW Seventh Ave., North Miami, 688-1898), an artist-friendly place hosting live performances Wednesday through Sunday. Tonight (Thursday) Jomo, South Florida’s master of the African thumb piano (the…
The Notorious B.I.G. Life After Death (Bad Boy) Though the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut offered a portrait of rich potential snuffed by despair, Life After Death fights such despair hard, from beginning to end. This epic of an album begins with a horrific death scene (a father repeatedly plugged in the…
Jim Lauderdale calls them “recording-artist horror stories,” and he can reel off a litany of them based on his own experiences as a singer/songwriter who’s steeped in raw honky-tonk as well as blues, rock, soul, bluegrass, and R&B. “The longer I’m in the business, the more I realize there are…
Meritocracy is not a word that leaps to mind when I think about the music biz. Merit, after all, has never counted for much in the face of balls-out profiteering. Which is just one of the reasons I joined the cult of Ani DiFranco about four years ago. In a…
With necessity being the mother of invention and the club circuit desperate to keep the kids coming, shiny and new one-nighters are popping up everywhere. The latest slew of theme parties runs the gamut of clubland with at least one option for everybody. On Friday relive the days of polyester…
It has been in production far longer than I’ve called Miami home, but it appears the film East of Overtown is actually inching toward completion. After nearly seven years of snail’s-pace production, this chronicle of the glory days of Overtown and the racial tension that’s been brewing in Miami and…
Rahsaan Patterson Rahsaan Patterson (MCA) At the 28th annual NAACP Image Awards on February 8 in Los Angeles, Prince was honored with a “Special Achievement Award,” presented by Stevie Wonder. Prince told the attendees that he first heard Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life as a teenager and that…
“We are not into biases or limitations,” says Michael Roderick as he sits in a dimly lit studio at the 54th Street Music House in Hialeah. “There are no boundaries, there are no lines — that is the full intention of music, of communication. The only thing that creates a…
Dig out your gold chains and your Fila cap and boogie down to the Cameo Theatre (1445 Washington Ave., Miami Beach, 532-0922) on Friday, April 18, for a mega bump and grind session with rap masters Run-D.M.C. and partner in crime Jam Master Jay. The boys from Queens who took…
The second-floor nightclub at Yuca restaurant on Lincoln Road is no ballroom; it’s more of a low-ceilinged cocktail lounge. When Tito Puente and his big band played a brief set there last Thursday, the thirteen band members were tightly packed on the small stage. The brass section had little elbow…
What you bring to a Van Morrison concert in the way of expectations no doubt depends on the extent of your exposure to this odd man and his equally odd career. That career is so lengthy and vast — loaded with mainstream pop hits, standards of album-rock radio, adult-contemporary ballads,…
When talking to Metallica’s vocalist and founding guitarist James Hetfield, the first thing that strikes you is that he seems a lot nicer than the guy behind that famously abrasive shouting and those furious, cathartic lyrics. From 1983’s Kill ‘Em All (“There is a feeling deep inside/That drives you fuckin’…
